Julia Gillard and the prince

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the team around her have become the embodiment of how to win when you’re not winning.
Photo: Kate Geraghty

by
Pamela Williams | Editor-at-large

Julia Gillard
has confounded critics and opponents both, with an unbroken belief in her own ability, from one day to the next, stretching weeks into months, until somewhat miraculously, a government which came into being in 2010, teetering on one foot in a driving wind, finds itself still standing as it enters the home straight of 2013.

All of this is thanks to Gillard’s unshakeable confidence in herself. To critics, and even some supporters, it seemed at first deluded. But Gillard’s brash persistence is the key to her political resilience. She has managed to sustain powerful supporters by leveraging and feeding a mix of toxic hatreds (of her predecessor
Kevin Rudd
) and a personal office staff of gutter fighters and believers who will swarm anyone in her path – sometimes with charm and logic, often as not with stinging attacks.

Deadly public polls showing the government on a trajectory to certain defeat have met the brick wall of Gillard’s self-confidence. She can break a touchstone election promise, she can brush off the embarrassment of being carried horizontally by protective police in Monty Python-esque TV footage, she can trip over on camera overseas, and she can face down months of sleaze allegations. She can find her judgment under fire on any number of crucial decisions. And yet she keeps popping back up. As do those around her.

GILLARD FRAMES A NARRATIVE

It may not win her another election, but Team Gillard has become the embodiment of how to win when you’re not winning.

She has morphed from her early days as party leader when she gained a reputation for not listening to anyone – to building gravitas and grudging public respect. Voters might be waiting on their verandahs with baseball bats – to use the pungent words of former Queensland Labor premier Wayne Goss who lost his majority in the 1996 Mundingburra byelection, followed soon after by
Paul Keating
’s government – but Gillard and those around her have managed to frame a narrative – a hallucination some might say – where they are in with a chance.

Of recent times, the government has launched major policies that can best be described as opaque when it comes to funding, and persisted with a fetish over the budget surplus which has now melted like ice sculpture. But again and again, Gillard has pushed back opponents – whether on the other side of politics, or the other side of her own caucus. Only once in recent times has she succumbed, and even then only at the hands of one of the silkier political henchmen on her team,
Bob Carr
, a survivalist from the he-who-punches-first school of the NSW Labor Right.

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Inside the castle, Gillard has her own personal member of the he-who-punches-first genre – in the larger-than-life personality of her Scottish communications director, John McTernan, once a top staffer to former British prime minister
Tony Blair
. Having initially slid quietly into the job, McTernan soon became the man most likely: most likely to tackle; most likely to phone to abuse critics; most likely to clobber the enemy. He proselytises, he defends the faith; he has that grating True Believer thing. But he has something else. He has Gillard’s trust. And Gillard has something else too. She has the Labor Party’s political machine, led by national secretary George Wright, now working hand in glove with her own office – with chief of staff Ben Hubbard and McTernan. This may seem to be just what it should be. But the bitter schism between the machine and the Prime Minister’s office under the last two Labor leaders,
Kevin Rudd
and
Paul Keating
, remains an indelible memory for those who believe that divided they fall.

McTernan joined Gillard in November last year. He might not have been on the public radar in Australia, but he was no blow-in. He had been coming to Australia since 2001, when he worked for Carlton TV Productions; by 2004 he had found his way to Sussex Street, home to the NSW union machine and Labor Right stronghold. He met three powerful political players – the Right brothers-in-arms
Mark Arbib
and
Karl Bitar
, and the Left strongman Luke Foley. He got to know
Bill Shorten
and David Feeney in Victoria, and he worked for former Victorian premier
Steve Bracks
and deputy premier
John Thwaites
. He was introduced to some of the key party machine figures now around Gillard and
Wayne Swan
and then met Gillard herself. McTernan worked for
Tim Gartrell
, then ALP national secretary in the period before former Labor leader
Kim Beazley
was rolled in 2006. He returned in 2007 to work on messaging in the election campaign that brought Rudd to power. He was appointed as an official “thinker" by then premier
Mike Rann
’s Labor government in South Australia and he worked with state machine man Sam Dastyari on a NSW election campaign. He had been one of the ALP’s go-to guys in Britain and by the time the call went out for a new communications chief for Gillard, McTernan had networks everywhere.

WHATEVER IT TAKES

When he met
Ben Hubbard
to discuss the communications job with Gillard, McTernan asked Hubbard what he wanted. “Paint your face blue and wave a sword running into a field of enemies," was the answer. In other words, whatever it takes.

McTernan, like Hubbard, believed Gillard’s parliamentary performances were the key to her character. They believed that Gillard had “it". The public, by contrast, seemed to believe Gillard had had it. The numbers in the polling were crushing and the prospect of a challenge from Rudd was sketched out daily in the press.

A year later, Gillard has torched Rudd’s ambitions and, against the odds, survived into the election year. Her strategy to become a real competitor in the election has now started to take shape around the economy. While logic would say that Gillard and Treasurer
Wayne Swan
have sustained yet another potentially fatal wound in the budget surplus fight, the track record suggests the Prime Minister still has some of her nine lives to expend.

The strategy developed by her office around Gillard’s broken promise on the carbon tax is a blueprint for all the dramas that now come her way. A mini-election campaign was developed around the July 1 starting date for the new tax – essentially a maquette of the powerful 1996 Liberals’ election campaign strategy of a new attention-grabbing policy announcement every day for the entire campaign.

BUILDING MOMENTUM

For the carbon tax, a mini-campaign was developed for the two weeks either side of the start-up date. A grid was developed, which included every regional market target and each marginal electorate. The Prime Minister’s office drove every message and what every Labor MP would say.

They widened the strategy, moving onto announcements on boat people (the Houston panel), the Gonski education report, the national disability scheme, the Asian white paper, on and on and on, trying to shift the media’s attention to policy and to push the Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott
into the corner with nothing positive to say. If half of it looked half-baked, it didn’t matter so long as the momentum kept building. They identified something that seemed like gold – difficulties for Abbott with women. It was a vein they could mine, pinning Abbott down by daring him on gender politics. They piled on.

Gillard found her old voice (as opposed to the nonsensical “Real Julia" she had developed almost to the point of parody in the last election campaign). When she called a party room spill to confront Rudd last February, that voice returned. “We took the cork out of the bottle," one staffer said later. They found a style for her, a way of talking which allowed her to look strong and resilient. Even Abbott conceded she would not lie down and die.

PROJECTING STRENGTH

Now, going into the election year, that “strong" pitch will be refined further into the communications message: “Gillard will be strong for you"; “Gillard is strong on education, strong on health."

The recent misogyny speech by Gillard that went viral was part of that same planning and positioning. The lines developed in Gillard’s office that morning, before question time were designed for the government’s response in the debate over parliamentary speaker
Peter Slipper
, whose vulgar text messages about women had reached the public domain. “I will not be lectured on misogyny by that man," was the line Gillard would wield against Abbott.

But first, senior minister
Anthony Albanese
would set the scene with a press conference. They call it a “smash-up". It was an attack on Abbott using four quotes from his past revealing his attitudes to women. Albanese repeated them over and over to the journalists and TV cameras rolling live. Later in Parliament, Gillard sat listening as Abbott spoke. She had her opening lines ready, plus she had the four bullet point quotes from Abbott’s history that Albanese had already started pushing to the press just hours before. She knew she had to counter Abbott’s arguments on Slipper without seeming to take Slipper’s side. And then, after Abbott, wittingly or unwittingly, declared that every day that Gillard supported Slipper was another day of shame for a government that should already have died of shame – she went for him. Abbott was accused of picking up on an earlier comment about the death of Gillard’s father by the broadcaster
Alan Jones
. Abbott’s words rocket-boosted the Prime Minister. “My father did not die of shame," she hurled back angrily.

That her speech was so profoundly effective was because Gillard had found her own voice to deliver the political message. She has moved since into territory difficult for Abbott – developing a relationship and networks with working mothers and women with children at school – even as her government moves to cut support for some of the most vulnerable in society (with no trade union to fight their corner) by chopping back payments to single mothers when the youngest child turns eight.

WINNING WOMEN

As the year unfolds, Gillard will mesh such strategic links as women’s networks (which she believes Abbott cannot do), with the wider policy framework designed to create a Labor Party story – the broadband network, help for the disabled and for education and supposedly, plans on how to pay for it all, with the whole lot rolled into one glorious old-fashioned Labor narrative.

The strategy is to turn around Labor voters who no longer think the government is Labor. With a relentless parallel focus on persuading the public that Abbott is just a negative megaphone without a policy, Labor hopes to create a break for the electorate to reassess whether they can actually vote for Gillard.

Gillard herself has a strong sense of her direction now. The office around her has a rolling strategy mapped out three months in advance. Gillard is aware of her weaknesses going into the campaign, but with the negative strategy on Abbott starting to bite, her self-belief is buoyed.

The government’s extraordinary measures to cushion the start of the carbon tax slashed into Abbott’s attack message so successfully that Team Gillard believes it might have bought a truce with the electorate. The schoolkids’ bonus might have been a shockingly opportunist way to buy their way out of trouble, but the message was “now you have cash in your pockets".

“Did they love her? No. But did it go off a cliff? No," said one key party operative.

This will be the strategic message all year; helping families and responding to the pressure they are under, while focusing on painting Abbott’s negatives in bright lights and smashing those who talk of smoking guns.

The government has reached an inflection point. Whether the polls have stalled remains to be seen.